Configuring Nginx logging

There are two types of logs that Nginx may write. One could also say that there are infinite types because of the log_format directive that allows you to create your own types of logs.

To refresh your memory about what directives are used to configure Nginx logging, here they are:

• The error_log directive configures the logging of exceptional events that the developers of Nginx consider worth noting. Usually, this is all kinds of errors.

  The format of the directive is this:

  error_log <destination> <log level>;

  Note

  The first parameter is usually a path to the file with the log. Recent versions of Nginx starting with 1.7.1 also support logging via syslog, to a local or remote syslog server. There is also a rarely used misnamed special value stderr, which, by the way, does not redirect logging to stderr (the third standard stdio stream or &2 in shell terms) because it does not make much sense to log to stderr from a daemon—daemonization involves...